Book Review: Creepers

I had no idea “urban explorers,” or the slang, creepers, was a thing. These are people who go into abandoned old sites, churches, drains, catacombs (France’s being the most famous), hotels, hospitals, tunnels, and so on partly out of the adrenaline and thrill of going somewhere forbidden and potentially dangerous and out of curiosity to see the past. I’ve always thought it would be neat to visit an abandoned hospital, or more specifically, an abandoned insane asylum just for the, well, creepy factor. With David Morrell’s 2005 book, Creepers, the idea of urban explorers turns into part Die Hard, part Daylight. As soon as I picked up the book to read, it occurred to me, wait a second, I know that name. Morrell is the author of the Rambo books, starting with 1972’s First Blood! I love the Rambo films, but haven’t actually read any of Morrell’s books before now. Far from merely being a unique premise and set-up for a novel, Morrell tells us in his Author’s Notes that he was an urban explorer as a young child. Morrell sought the past through urban exploration as way to escape his present trauma (violent shouting matches between his mother and step-dad). Since First Blood, Morrell seems interested in the subject of trauma and examining its machinations in his protagonists. That’s no different in Creepers, with Frank Balenger as the protagonist: he’s a Gulf War veteran, who then later experience further PTSD in the second Iraq War in 2003 after nearly being beheaded. (It’s fascinating, and disturbing, how many soldiers of a certain age could bookend their military careers by the two different Bush-led Iraq wars.) Also of note is one of Morrells resources, the website, infiltration.org, which is all about “going places you’re not supposed to go.” Notably, its lead explorer and creator, was an explorer nicknamed Ninjalicious, who incidentally died in 2005 at the age of 32. The site is still maintained in his honor.

Balenger proffers himself as a reporter to an academic group of urban explorers who are set to explore the abandoned Paragon Hotel in the relatively abandoned Asbury Park, New Jersey. They don’t know he’s actually a veteran, a trained Army Ranger at that, and concealing a gun. The academics are Professor Conklin, married couple Rick and Cora, and their best friend, Vinnie. Ostensibly, they’re in it for the curiosity factor, which is why they have the rule of “leave no trace behind.” They go deep into the Paragon Hotel’s history, with reclusive owner, Morgan Carlisle. He suffered from agoraphobia and was a hemophiliac, and essentially turned the hotel into his personal, voyeuristic fortress (as he spied on the hotel guests) until its closure in 1968 and then his death by suicide shortly thereafter.

The Paragon Hotel presents the challenges of any long-abandoned building: unsafe stairs and flooring, owing to decay; rats and other vermin carrying god knows what; and secrets kept behind abandoned walls, such as a 1920s gangster keeping a vault of gold coins near his usual room. Some secrets only unfurl once inside the Paragon Hotel, though, like Balenger’s thinly veiled reason for being there (after all, he didn’t know the big events of 1968 like a reporter would have!). His real reason for being there is because his wife, Diane, disappeared two years ago, and he thinks the Paragon Hotel, one of the last places anyone saw her alive, could hold the answers. He became an “infiltrator” of sorts by using the professor’s greed about the gold coins to get into the group. Additionally, in the hands of Morrell, there needed to be more at stake than the standard issues with an abandoned hotel; he had to up the action stakes. While searching through the hotel in the overnight hours, Balenger and the academic urban explorers are accosted by three murderous thieves. I’m not sure what their original impetus was for going into the Paragon Hotel, as they only learned about the gold coins from stalking the academics. Still, once they’re inside, they’re brutal. To show they mean business, they throw Rick off of a balcony seemingly to his death (he later survives only long enough to then die in front of Cora), and one of the men repeatedly threatens to sexually assault Cora. Eventually, Balenger and the academics under duress are able to find the gangster’s vault for the three men and discover the gold coins, but in so doing, they also discover Amanda. Amanda is a kidnapped woman who was being held in the vault by someone named Ronnie. Come to find out, Ronnie was a child taken to the hotel by his dad in the early 1960s to be molested by another man. The dad was already molesting him prior. At the hotel, Ronnie bashed his dad’s head in with a bat, killing him. After being released from juvenile detention, for whatever reason, Carlisle takes a liking to him. That’s how Ronnie knows so much about the hotel and is indeed, the executor of the trust for the property (which was why Diane visited him). One of my favorite storylines in action or horror is the “there’s always a bigger fish” sort of trope. Which is to say, the three original violent men accosting Balenger and the academics met an “even bigger fish” in Ronnie. He dispatched two of them quite easily, which left Tod to form an alliance with the people he was just previously threatening in order to survive Ronnie.

Thanks to the heroics of Balenger, who stayed focus on avenging his wife’s death and helping the one remaining academic (Vinnie) and Amanda, they are able to survive the night. That’s why I referenced Morrell’s book as a mash-up of the movies Die Hard and Daylight. The obvious connection to Die Hard is it taking place in a large building with human foes all around. With Daylight, it’s more so the unpredictability of the fighting environment. Morrell made fun use of the unpredictable environment in this urban landscape to create tension, suspense, and fun action sequences that put the characters in peril. But it also has to be said that it was Amanda, Ronnie’s victim for nearly a half a year, who bashed in Ronnie’s head with a 2×4 at the end, killing him. I liked that she wasn’t merely a “damsel in distress” for Balenger. She was an active participant in her own survival.

Morrell’s book kept the tension up after an interesting premise — and I had no idea where it was going; if anything, I was predicting something more akin to The Descent! — through to an exciting climax where I wasn’t sure who, other than Balenger, would actually survive. Morrell sure wasn’t shy about brutally killing off characters, good or bad ones. Plus, I learned about something I didn’t know existed before with urban explorers. Pretty neat. There is also something to be said for how quickly time and life moves, from creation to abandonment to destruction, of buildings and of people. Morrell managed to weave some of that trauma and inevitability into Creepers as well.